Anne Marchand and Stuart Walter wrote a paper that is on the interface between design and consumption: they show ways of ‘simplifying’ (and hence dematerialising) need provision systems, while keeping them at the same time attractive for consumers given their dreams, desires, and habits.

Those papers present some of the design research direction and results based on the understanding that a stringent interpretation of sustainability requires a systemic discontinuity in production and consumption patterns, which are investigating a possible role for design for eco-efficient system innovation and social equity and cohesion improvements: wider dimensions than that of single products or of the materials and energies they consume.

This is the effective model of change the design world should work for, seeking to identify, develop and apply the correlated (design) skills.

The growing movement in street art often takes the form of a political message. To mark International Peace Day, British artists Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss accompanied by 60 volunteers and 500 local residents, took to the beaches of Normandy and etched 9,000 fallen soldier silhouettes into the sand using rakes and stencils.

The future course of the world depends on humanity’s ability to provide a high quality life for a prospective 9 billion people without exhausting the Earth’s resources or irreparably damaging its natural systems.